**1. Introduction**

While decades of research demonstrate the importance of high-quality early childhood education, in the United States federal and state governments provide only limited public funding for early learning. As a result, municipal governments are increasingly using local funding sources to provide more equitable access to high quality early childhood education and care. This chapter will highlight the challenges to obtaining adequate funding and how cities have used creative methods to provide educational opportunities for young children. The featured example is an innovative, comprehensive community-based program in San Antonio, Texas: Pre-K 4 SA. The chapter also includes strategies to inspire and spark creativity for how early education and care across the globe can be funded to implement quality supports in local contexts and communities.

#### **1.1 The importance of funding high-quality early education and care**

Providing high-quality early education and care experiences for all children is a global priority. In fact, the fourth sustainable development goal of the United Nations is to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all". A target of this goal is by 2030, all children will have access to quality early childhood developmental care and education [1]. Within the United States, there is not a comprehensive system for education and care from birth through age five. Instead, it is provided through a combination of federal, state, and local policies and programs [2]. Formal schooling for children starts between the ages of five and seven years old depending on the state in which a child resides [3]. Research on the period of education prior to formal schooling has been ongoing for decades [4–15]. A comprehensive meta-analysis of 123 studies on early childhood programs in the United States provided evidence that preschool (defined as programs prior to formal schooling) by itself can close half the achievement gap between lowand high-income students [16]. When considering the research evidence of early childhood education in the United States, two pioneer programs often cited are the Perry Preschool program and the Abecedarian project [17, 18]. Both were rigorously designed using experimental methods and found long-lasting impacts of high-quality preschool education. These benefits include children entering formal schooling better prepared and less likely to repeat a grade, higher I.Q. scores, greater achievement test scores, increased likelihood of attending a 4-year college or university, having a skilled job resulting in higher lifetime earnings, owning a home and car, and improved health outcomes. At the same time, there was a reduction in the likelihood of being a teen parent, reporting depressive symptoms, and committing fewer crimes [17, 18]. Taken together, high-quality early childhood education provides short- and long-term benefits, as well as a pathway for children to mature to their full potential.

While much research has validated the importance of high-quality early learning environments to achieve successful long-term outcomes, providing such environments for all children continues to be a challenge due to a lack of adequate funding [4–15, 19, 20]. In 2015, only 0.33% of the United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was spent on early education while the average public spending among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries was 0.74% [21]. In the United States, early education and care is funded through federal, state, and local systems in a piecemeal fashion, creating a disjointed governance structure controlling multiple funding streams with diverse priorities and targeting different populations of families. Although 44 of the 50 states have universal public preschool programs, these programs only serve approximately one-third of fouryear-old children in the country [22]. Additionally, many of these programs lack key quality benchmarks for providing and implementing instructional supports that are necessary to obtain the lasting benefits of preschool [19, 22]. In order to operate, programs must blend multiple funding streams at multiple levels [23]. Therefore, greater investments are needed to expand access to serve more children in high-quality early learning environments.

In order to ensure young children have access to the critical resource of highquality early education, cities have become creative in identifying potential funding sources and seeking strategic collaborations to support early learning initiatives

*Community Approaches to Funding and Supports for High-Quality Early Care Experiences... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112434*

**Figure 1.** *Visual representation of necessary resources to provide high-quality early learning.*

to meet the needs of their communities. Early childhood education has proven so beneficial that The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have identified these programs as an important and effective tool to improving community health. Local funding for early learning programs is touted as one of the best non-clinical cost-effective approaches, since investments in high-quality early education generate positive health results within five years that persist over the lifetime of a city [24]. In summary, a visual representation of the necessary resources to provide high-quality early learning is displayed in **Figure 1**. In the next section, we will examine the various approaches cities have taken to fund high-quality early education and care in the United States.
